VOD Delivery of Client-Watermarked Content

This paper describes an architecture that serves as a deterrent to piracy of high-value video content delivered on-demand to devices using adaptive HTTP streaming. The system works by uniquely altering, or watermarking, video delivered to each viewer in such a way that it is visually imperceptible, persistent though video processing (such as re-encoding or re-capturing via a camera pointing at a screen), and detectable through special forensic techniques. The alterations in the video store information uniquely identify the user to which the video was served, so that if the video is pirated and distributed, it is possible to identify the pirating customer.